27 November, 2016

Screen21 Interview

Finally a video with some new Filly Funtasia material! Well, it's not really that new since it was uploaded almost half a year ago, and it's not a promo - it's an interview with Toni García, creative director of Screen21. However, you can see some never before seen Filly Funtasia material in the background of the interview. Let's take a look at it!

First, let's begin by a disclaimer: I don't speak Spanish. Therefore, I won't try to analyze what he's actually saying in the video since I can't really understand anything. If you speak Spanish, please watch the video, and if they're saying anything interesting related to Filly Funtasia, please let us know in the comments.

Where is this video from? Well, it was uploaded on the YouTube channel
of L'Idem Barcelona which is a creative arts school. The video seems
like it's directed at the students of said school. The video description
itself doesn't mention Filly Funtasia which made it hard to find.

The first Filly Funtasia sighting is right in the beginning of the video - he's standing in front of a wall filled with concept art for BRB shows, and there's a few pieces of Filly Funtasia concept art directly to the left of him. (screen left, not his left)

There's five concept art prints which are identifiable as Filly. Two of them are fairly visible - one featuring Rose and the other featuring Bijou, the owl. Then there are three more which are hard to make out as they are so very blurry.

We've posted a set of Bijou poses in a previous concept art article, and one of the poses does seem very similar between the two sets - the one where Bijou sits on a branch. The main difference is that the previously posted version featured a little dust cloud. The rest of the poses appear unique.

Below that, we have five Rose poses showcasing various emotions. As far as I know, they're all new. For some reason, Rose doesn't have a horn. (Despite the lack of horn, the crown shape together with the tail flowers and general style matches what we usually see in Rose drawings.)

Then, there's the three blurry ones. This is probably the one where you can make out the most details. The concept art page shows two different poses for a pair of Fillys - one where they stand next to each other and one where one of them is whispering something in the other's ear. I can't make out who these Fillys are. The one on the left may possibly be a Fairy since the crown type kind of looks right, but it's way too blurry to be sure.

Next, let's take a quick look at the one at the bottom left. Here's a Filly in a standing pose and a pose which kind of makes it look like her mirror has just been dropped. Due to a lack of a horn, wings, crown wings, cape and hat, this Filly looks like a Princess/Royale Filly. (Unless these features were removed just like Rose's horn.) While the drawing is very blurry and the hair doesn't quite match, the closest resemblance I can find is the recurring promo background character Melody as the crown shape seems about right.

Finally, let's take a look at the last and least detailed one.

A Unicorn! The blur is at max strength here, but it kind of looks like yet another Rose, but with her horn this time. But it's really way too blurry to be sure.

From 00:28 to 00:41, they show a sequence of clips from Promo 5, but with a BRB watermark as well as a Filly Funtasia watermark. This sequence is most identical to the initial short version of Promo 5 that was released before we got the full sequence, except that this sequence has been shortened even more.

Then, at about 01:26, we get to this scene:

The artwork for the Filly five seems to be the same artwork as in the promotional synopses document we've posted about. However, while the text is too low res to be readable, it seems to be different from the text on the promotional slides based on the number of rows of text. The artwork for Batti and Wranglum does not seem to match the slides.

Then, at 02:05, we get to this:

To the right, he's drawing the "master curator" that we've previously seen in concept art with Photoshop and a drawing pad, while the left has a reference image and a still image from finished Filly Funtasia animation! Let's zoom in a bit on two different angles of it.

While we've never seen this exact shot in any of the promos, we have seen this hallway before. Note the purple mosaic which is a hallmark of this hallway.

So what does this video give us? Well, while it gives us a very limited amount of new Filly Funtasia information, it does show us that BRB and its animation studio Screen21 still acknowledged Filly Funtasia at the time that the video was filmed. It was uploaded on 3 June 2016, but it might have been filmed quite a bit earlier than that - unfortunately there seems to be no way of knowing when exactly it was filmed. They film computer taskbars a few times which appear to feature dates, but the numbers look like they're way too blurry to be legible.